Kula: Library Futures Academy is pleased to announce that Nathaniel Brunt, VPRI Aspiration 2030 & Kula Postdoctoral Fellow, has received the prestigious 2026 Hannah Arendt Fellowship awarded by the German state of Lower Saxony and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
The grant application was sponsored by German librarian Lambert Heller, Head of the Open Science Lab at Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) Hanover and KULA’s Inaugural International Visiting Fellow, as well as professor Ina Blümel, Deputy Head of the Open Science Lab and Professor of Library and Information Studies at the Hanover University of Applied Sciences.
Nathaniel will be hosted by TIB Hanover starting April 2026. He and Ina will work closely together to help knit closer ties with the Yazidi community in Germany, elevate the Sersal project’s outreach, and conduct research on open and sustainable software solutions suited as infrastructure for sustainable safeguarding of cultural heritage in the aftermath of conflict.
The Sersal project is an international, non-partisan, collaborative initiative committed to digitally preserving, centralizing, and making accessible the photographic and cultural heritage of Iraq’s Yezidi (Êzîdî) people. Founded in 2024, the Sersal project was created by an interdisciplinary team from Iraq/KRI, Spain/US, the Netherlands, and Canada that includes academics, designers, architects, journalists, researchers, librarians, documentarians, and local members of the Yezidi community in Iraq.
Many thanks to Kula Librarian Research Associate, Christian Schmidt, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to facilitate the application.